Using the literatures of student personal epistemology and approaches to learning, this article describes one WPA’s deliberate pursuit of a deep approach to her learning about reflection. Other WPAs and instructors who have encountered an unexpected gap in their programs’ or classes’ work with reflection can revise documents and re-tune pedagogy so that students are encouraged from the beginning of the course to think of their learning in terms of a narrative and not a container, seeing multimodal communication work in first- and second-year foundational courses as a developing network of understanding and ability rather than as an accumulation of discrete bits of skill and knowledge. We can do this by encouraging students to more meaningfully and concretely understand their learning processes as developing and their reflections as representations of those processes. The ePortfolio can provide the space and the occasion for such an understanding when it functions as more than merely a storage space and when accompanying curricula and pedagogy invite students to become self-aware learners through the powerful potential of their reflective work.
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/barbara-blakely/2/
This article is published as Blakely, Barbara J. “Voicing the E in WOVE: Improving Reflection in ISUComm Foundation Courses.” International Journal of ePortfolio 6.2 (2016): 139-146. Posted with permission.